Happy Samhain
What is a Samhain, i hear you ask;
Samhain is a Pagan Sabbat or seasonal holy festival day, though it is really both a season and a holy day. The Pagan year begins and ends with Samhain. It is a festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, the Holly King rules this darker half of the year. Samhain is celebrated on sunset 31 October to 1 November in the Northern Hemisphere, but here in Australia we are in the Southern Hemisphere, so we celebrate Samhain (Halloween) 30 April to 1May.
It is a time to Honor our ancestors, to remember and celebrate the dead. It is a time of reflection, a time when the walls between this world and the other world (specifically the world of the dead) are thin. You have seen this festival as Halloween, but there are other similar holy days dedicated to honoring the dead all around the world.
The thing is Halloween has only just begun being celebrated in Australia. I should say mainstream Australia, and i should also say trick or treating has started, and i should say mimicked not celebrated, as the holy days holiness seems to be mostly being ignored.
Now being able to celebrate my holy day with everyone else would be very cool. As opposed to say mainstream Australians celebrating the winter festival in the horrible Midsummer heat.
But alas it is not to be as the shops sell the Halloween paraphernalia in October, and the trickers come mumming around, what is the festival of Beltane where we would celebrate life, not death.
Now i sort of understand the other "holidays" being at the wrong time of year for Australians, as the seasonal holy days were appropriated from there Pagan practitioners in the Northern Hemisphere and simply transplanted here into the Southern Hemisphere, where the remaining seasonal symbolism simply doesn't make any sense. (Think Yule in the height of Summer.)
But this our sacred Samhain, our Halloween has survived with none of that baggage (at least not for most Australians) so it saddens me that there will be no trick or treats again this Samhain, though i always keep a bowl of treats out just in case.
I hope you have a blessed Samhain.
Shark Attack!
We lived in rural New South Wales Australia, moved there when I was a tender
five years of age. We moved from Sydney
into a property a good distance from the dirt road with mostly empty fields.
The one saving grace of this property was that it backed onto the Richmond river,
the river paddock had pretty much been left to nature and offered much shade
and tranquility. Now don’t get me wrong it wasn’t some hippy nature love fest,
the trees were only allowed to grow along the riverbank to avoid losing land to
erosion. The river usually flooded once a year leaving us isolated, and when
there wasn’t torrential rain there was often devastating drought with temperatures
in the high 40s.
I
remember one time we all went swimming in the river, I had a inflated tire tube
and was forbidden to remove it, it was put on a rope as the current was too
strong for my young legs to fight against, and I was quickly pushed down
stream.
But other than that, the river was mine to explore, my next oldest brother, Stephany,
five years older than me, would sometimes fish of the old wharf. Sometimes I would
go and sit with him as I had nothing better to do, I remember I liked watching
the crabs playing in the mud. The river was tidal, revealing muddy shallows at
low tide.
So I can’t quite remember what year this occurred, I was young, being picked up and
carried around, I was a small kid. I think I may have been about 7 or 8 but could not swear on it.
It was at low tide that Stephany decided
to play the bully, he was often mean and would go out of his way to get me into
trouble with our father. This time we were standing on the wharf and he pushes
me, and then goes to grab me as he says “Tell mum I saved you!”
Now what was supposed to happen is that he pushed me, I flinched,
lurched off the wharf and he would have grabbed me, preventing me from falling in, and thus “saving
me”.
What actually happened was that he pushes me and fails to catch me, so I go flying over the edge into the
mud, I am only light but I still sink into the mud a few inches. My legs are facing
the water, and half in the water, my feet are completely in the river.
So Stephany apologises and asks me not to “dob on him”, and says i "wasn't supposed to fall off", I say something stupid, like “You didn’t save me”, as i am sinking into the mud looking up at him on
the wharf.
So we both start laughing and I start trying to stand, I’m kicking in the
water, and my feet can’t get a grip, I’m just sliding in the mud, I’m making
the water muddy. The wharf was about a meter high above the mud so i had no chance of using it for leverage, even if i had been standing.
Stephany says something, along the lines of “move closer to
the wharf and ill pull you up”, I don’t remember exactly.
What I do remember, vividly to this very day, is
that my attention was drawn to a grey white shape approaching in the now
muddying water. It took a while for my young mind to register what it was. I
just moved both my feet up out of the water, somehow managing to stand in a
kind of ninja jump move, as the shark lunged left and right at my feet. I
screamed for Stephany to help me up as I sunk deeper into the mud. I know he
looked back at where it was, it splashed as it turned,, I looked back myself and saw its swimming back out
to deeper waters.
Bull Shark
I do not know if he was afraid of getting into trouble or if he hadn’t actually
seen it, but he never admitted that there was a shark, he claimed it must have
just been a big catfish.
Now we did have both dogfish and catfish in the river, but it wasn’t one of those,
I had seen my brothers fishing; I knew what those fish looked like.
In fact no one
believed me, I was repeatedly told that sharks don’t live in rivers, they live
in the sea. However I knew what I saw, I never went into the river again, but
often enjoyed exploring the riverbank.
Fast-forward a few years and I heard that sometimes sharks do travel up the
river in floods and to “clean out their gills”. Though I was still told that
sharks would not go this far up the river.
Today it is common knowledge that bull sharks, actually live happily in salt or
fresh water, though when I say happily I mean hungrily, as they are responsible
for most attacks in shallow water.
This is a fact and they are often caught in
the Richmond River where I had my near miss. While at the time I thought it was
a baby great white shark (it looked to be about two foot long) on reflection I would
assume that it was in fact a Bull Shark, i don't even think i knew there were different kinds of sharks at that age..
Writing this I was curious to know what my brother Stephany now says about the
shark I saw, so i asked him, and his reply was typical;
“That was probably just a big catfish.”
